The Onge language (also spelled ''Öñge'', ''Ongee, Eng,'' or ''Ung'') is one of two known
Ongan languages within the
Andaman family. It is spoken by the
Onge people in
Little Andaman Island
Little Andaman Island (Onge: ''Gaubolambe'') is the fourth largest of the Andaman Islands of India with an area of 707 km2, lying at the southern end of the archipelago. It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of th ...
in
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...
.
History
In the 18th century the Onge were distributed across
Little Andaman Island
Little Andaman Island (Onge: ''Gaubolambe'') is the fourth largest of the Andaman Islands of India with an area of 707 km2, lying at the southern end of the archipelago. It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of th ...
and the nearby islands, with some territory and camps established on
Rutland Island
Rutland Island is an island of the Andaman Islands. It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The island is located south from Port Blair.
History
The island ...
and the southern tip of
South Andaman Island
South Andaman Island is the southernmost island of the Great Andaman and is home to the majority of the population of the Andaman Islands.
It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman a ...
. Originally restive, they were pacified by
M. V. Portman in the 1890s.
[George Weber, ]
the Tribes
'. Chapter 8 in
'. Accessed on 2012-07-03. By the end of the 19th century they sometimes visited the
South
South is one of the cardinal directions or compass points. The direction is the opposite of north and is perpendicular to both east and west.
Etymology
The word ''south'' comes from Old English ''sūþ'', from earlier Proto-Germanic ''*sunþa ...
and
North Brother Islands to catch
sea turtle
Sea turtles (superfamily Chelonioidea), sometimes called marine turtles, are reptiles of the order Testudines and of the suborder Cryptodira. The seven existing species of sea turtles are the flatback, green, hawksbill, leatherback, loggerhe ...
s; at the time, those islands seemed to be the boundary between their territory and the range of the
Great Andamanese people
The Great Andamanese are an indigenous people of the Great Andaman archipelago in the Andaman Islands. Historically, the Great Andamanese lived throughout the archipelago, and were divided into ten major tribes. Their distinct but closely relate ...
further north.
[M. V. Portman (1899), ]
A history of our Relations with the Andamanese
', Volume II. Office of the Government Printing, Calcutta, India. Today, the surviving members (less than 100) are confined to two reserve camps on Little Andaman, Dugong Creek in the northeast and South Bay.
The Onge were semi-nomadic and fully dependent on
hunting and gathering for food.
The Onge are one of the aboriginal peoples (
adivasi
The Adivasi refers to inhabitants of Indian subcontinent, generally tribal people. The term is a Sanskrit word coined in the 1930s by political activists to give the tribal people an indigenous identity by claiming an indigenous origin. The t ...
) of India. Together with the other Andamanese tribes and a few other isolated groups elsewhere in
Oceania
Oceania (, , ) is a geographical region that includes Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Spanning the Eastern and Western hemispheres, Oceania is estimated to have a land area of and a population of around 44.5 million ...
, they comprise the
Negrito
The term Negrito () refers to several diverse ethnic groups who inhabit isolated parts of Southeast Asia and the Andaman Islands. Populations often described as Negrito include: the Andamanese peoples (including the Great Andamanese, the On ...
peoples, believed to be remnants of a very early migration out of
Africa
Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...
.
Status
Onge used to be spoken throughout Little Andaman as well as in smaller islands to the north - and possibly in the southern tip of
South Andaman
South Andaman Island is the southernmost island of the Great Andaman and is home to the majority of the population of the Andaman Islands.
It belongs to the South Andaman administrative district, part of the Indian union territory of Andaman a ...
island. Since the middle of the 19th century, with the arrival of the British in the
Andamans, and, after
Indian independence, the massive inflow of Indian settlers from the mainland, the number of Onge speakers has steadily declined, although a moderate increase has been observed in recent years. Currently, there are only 94 native speakers of Onge, confined to a single settlement in the northeast of Little Andaman island (see map below), making it an
endangered language
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a "dead lang ...
.
Demographic troubles
The Onge are one of the least fertile people in the world. About 40% of the married couples are sterile. Onge women rarely become pregnant before the age of 28. Infant and child mortality is in the range of 40%. The Onge's
net reproductive index
In population ecology and demography, the net reproduction rate, ''R''0, is the average number of offspring (often specifically daughters) that would be born to a female if she passed through her lifetime conforming to the age-specific fertilit ...
is 0.91.
[A. N. Sharma (2003), ]
Tribal Development in the Andaman Islands
', page 64. Sarup & Sons, New Delhi. The net reproductive index among the Great Andamanese is 1.40.
A depiction of Onge people in Kolkata Museum
Population
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Phonology
Vowels
There is some
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, me ...
: 1p pl. prefix et- becomes
t-when the vowel in the next syllable is /u/, e.g. ''et-eɟale'' 'our faces' but ''ot-oticule'' 'our heads'.
Consonants
/ʔ/? (c.f. Blevins (2007:161))
Blevins (2007:160-161) states that /c, ɟ/ are actually affricates, and that retroflexes may or may not be phonemic.
/kʷ/ delabializes to /k/ before /u, o/.
Phonemic /d/ surfaces as
intervocalically, while arguably some words have phonemic /r/ which alternates with surface
, l, j
Phonotactics
Words may be monosyllabic or longer, even in
content word Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate acti ...
s (unlike in the closely related
Jarawa).
Words may begin with consonants or vowels, and maximal syllables are of the form CVC.
All Onge words end in vowels, except for imperatives, e.g. ''kaʔ'' 'give'.
Consonant-final stems in Jarawa often have cognates with final ''e'' in Onge, e.g. Jarawa ''iŋ'', Onge ''iŋe'' 'water'; Jarawa ''inen'', Onge ''inene'' 'foreigner'; Jarawa ''dag'', Onge ''dage'' 'coconut'.
Historically these vowels must have been excrescent, as nonetymological word-final e doesn't surface when number markers are suffixed, and the definite article (-''gi'' after etymological consonants, -''i'' after etymological vowels, due to lenition) appears as -''i'' after etymological ''e'' but as -''gi'' after excrescent ''e'', e.g. ''daŋe'' → ''daŋe-gi'' 'tree; dugout'; ''kue'' → ''kue-i'' 'pig'.
NC clusters sometimes optionally reduce to single C, e.g. ~ 'to drink' (c.f. Jarawa ).
Voiced obstruents may optionally nasalize in syllable onset when the coda is nasal, e.g. ''bone''/''mone'' 'resin, resin torch' (c.f. Jarawa ''pone'' 'resin, resin torch').
Morphophonemics
Clusters across morpheme boundaries simplify to homorganic sequences, including
geminate
In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
s, which may occur after word final -e drops, e.g. ''daŋe'' 'tree, dugout canoe' → ''dandena'' 'two canoes'; ''umuge'' 'pigeon' → ''umulle'' 'pigeons'.
References
Bibliography
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Onge language
Agglutinative languages
Critically endangered languages
Languages of India
Ongan languages